Oceans Connect: Reflections on Water Worlds across Time and Space explores how seas and oceans connect geographically and through networks of trade, cooperation, beliefs, scientific knowledge and even rumour. More importantly, it makes a case for the decolonization of regional history by way of defining it through ocean spaces rather than land borders and therefore brings into focus the distinction between marine and maritime worlds.
Looking at the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, as also the Mediterranean Sea through the ages, the book argues for a re-conceptualization of maritime history. The essays in this volume depart from the earlier trajectory of viewing waterscapes chiefly as bodies fringed by land or as empty spaces, to exploring them as autonomous bodies. Accordingly, this volume examines mobility and paths of cultural transmission, i.e. how people, goods and ideas travelled across waters; the imagined unities of peoples (locals and diasporas), regions, trading blocs and empires; and the restructured paradigms of vision, time and space. It also reveals how similar cultural strategies came to be developed over vast spaces. Oceans Connect: Reflections on Water Worlds across Time and Space attempts to rescript the lines of enquiry that revolve around the history of the sea(s) and makes a powerful case for a new thalassology.